David Moyes stopped short of saying Sunderland need a miracle to survive, but right now divine intervention is looking like the Black Cats’ best hope.

The Wearsiders pulled off a ‘miracle escape’ three years ago when Gus Poyet was in charge, clinching survival with a game to spare despite finding themselves seven points adrift with only six games remaining.

And they would need a similar finish if they are to beat the drop this season, with this defeat at the hands of Watford leaving them anchored to the foot of the table, seven points from safety and with only nine games to save their Premier League skins.

“We need to win games, I don’t know about miracles - but they do happen, because they have for Sunderland a couple of times recently,” said Moyes.

“The club has been here before, although I haven’t been here before - it’s new to me.

"It’s new [to me] because the team is at the bottom of the league and I don’t want to be in this position when we are losing.

“But the people at the club know what it is like. I know they were seven points from safety with six games to go at one stage, and if you can do it [survive] from that position then you can do it from any.

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The winning goal at Vicarage Road came after Sunderland failed to deal with a corner just before the hour, and the ball was eventually headed home by Miguel Britos.

But Moyes felt there was little between the sides aside from that.

He said: “Watford are probably the biggest team in the league and they remind me of a couple of the old-fashioned teams years ago. We defended set-pieces really well against them, except on one occasion.

“We just didn’t deal with that one in the second half.

“We needed to take something from the game today and I thought that overall we deserved to take something.

“I don’t actually think we deserved to lose today and if we had got something out of the game I don’t think you could argue with it if it had been a point apiece.

“I thought we played better later on when we tried to create and got forward a bit more.

“I suppose partly that was because Watford were playing for the result and hanging on a wee bit.

“I was more disappointed at the start of the second half when Watford gained that bit of momentum and we didn’t stop that.”